RE: [Axiom-developer] Re: noweb

[Page, Bill]

Tim,

You wrote:

> ...
> Bill Page wrote:
> > Really, this script is not so hard to understand is it?
> 
> yes, it is. really. it just reads as line noise to me. for
> example, the variable 'uses' is not defined anywhere. nor
> is 'defns'. what exactly is it trying to iterate over and
> where does the data come from?

This is part of noweb. It would help a lot if you would bother
to read the noweb documentation:

http://www.literateprogramming.com/noweb_hacker.pdf

This was written by the author of noweb so I do expect that
he had literate programming in mind.

> this is all probably apparent to a sed/awk/shell
> programmer but the point of literate programming is to make it
> apparent to those people who need to maintain it. if i can't
> understand it without learning 3 new languages then the next
> person who needs to maintain it might not understand it either.
> 
> the fact that you understand a scripting language does not
> make it the least bit transparent to me. 
> 

Get serious! awk is a standard unix tool and is part of every
linux distribution. It has been around for at least as long
the C programming language. We make no attempt to explain C
programming or even lisp programming to anyone, so why should
we need to explain awk?

Regards,
Bill Page.